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Wednesday, February 13th, 2019
| Time | Event |
| 9:00a | An Animated Reconstruction of Ancient Rome: Take A 30-Minute Stroll Through the City’s Virtually-Recreated Streets
There are numerous ancient stories illustrating the gargantuan ego of the Emperor Nero. Some of these may rise to the level of historical character assassination. Nero did not, for example, fiddle while Rome burned. For one thing, the fiddle did not exist. For another, as the historian Tacitus records, although the emperor was miles away at his villa in Antium when the fires began, it’s said he returned to Rome and led relief efforts, paying for many of them out of his own pocket and housing the newly homeless in his garden. But the story may have been rewritten to burnish Nero’s reputation. After the masses blamed him for starting the fire, he turned around and blamed the city’s Christians, Tacitus reports, staging elaborate spectacles of torture, burning, and dismemberment. Suetonius does record him as giving some sort of musical performance during the fires of 64 A.D., a rumor that had apparently taken hold among the people. Whatever part he played, and whatever truth there is to charges that he murdered the son of Claudius, one of his wives, and even his own mother, Nero clearly felt a pressing need to leave a different impression of himself—as a towering, bronze god-like figure nearly 100 feet high.  In the same year as the fires, he commissioned a colossal statue of himself as the sun god, inspired by the Colossus of Rhodes. The massive Nero held a rudder perched atop a globe, suggesting that his rule steered the course of the whole world. Nero killed himself before the statue was completed, but Pliny the Elder writes of seeing its creation in the studio of the sculptor, Zenodorus. It arose towering above his palace, the Domus Aurea, in 72 A.D., and in 127, Hadrian moved it near the Amphitheatrum Flavium, which subsequently became known in the statue’s honor as the Colosseum. It took up to 24 elephants to do the job, or so it’s said. For the next few hundred years, until at least the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410 and a subsequent series of earthquakes, residents and visitors to the city walked beneath the looming Nero/Helios/Apollo statue, just fifty feet shy of the Statue of Liberty. It was depicted on medallions and gems. Now the statue is completely vanished, with nothing but a remnant of its pedestal remaining. But you can see it reconstructed, along with 27 other ancient Roman monuments, temples, baths, mausoleums, amphitheaters, arenas, etc.—many of them as grandiose and storied as the Colossus—in the thirty-minute video above. No, it’s not like strolling the streets of ancient Rome. The blockily-rendered CGI recreations appear over contemporary video of the city, full of contemporary traffic and contemporary fashions. As in every historical recreation of antiquity, for which the sources are few and contradictory, we have to use our imaginations. The exercise is infinitely richer the more you learn about the vanished or ruined structures that once dominated the city. See the full list of ancient buildings and sculptures below.
Related Content: Take Animated Virtual Reality Tours of Ancient Rome at Its Architectural Peak (Circa 320 AD) An Interactive Map Shows Just How Many Roads Actually Lead to Rome All the Roman Roads of Italy, Visualized as a Modern Subway Map Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness An Animated Reconstruction of Ancient Rome: Take A 30-Minute Stroll Through the City’s Virtually-Recreated Streets is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 12:00p | “Odyssey of the Ear”: A Beautiful Animation Shows How Sounds Travel Into Our Ears and Become Thoughts in Our Brain
As all schoolchildren know, we hear with our ears. And as all schoolchildren also probably know, we hear with our brains — or if they don't know it, at least they must suspect it, given the way sounds around us seem to turn without effort into thoughts in our heads. But how? It's the interface between ear and brain where things get more complicated, but "Odyssey of the Ear," the six-minute video above, makes it much clearer just how sound gets through our ears and into our brains. Suitable for viewers of nearly any age, it combines silhouette animation (of the kind pioneered by Lotte Reiniger) with live action, projection, and even dance. According to the video, which was originally produced as part of HarvardX's Fundamentals of Neuroscience course, the process works something like this. Our outer ear collects sounds from our environment when things vibrate in the physical world, producing variations in air pressure, or "sound waves" that pass through the air. The sound waves enter the ear and pass down through the auditory canal, at the end of which they hit the ear drum. The ear drum transfers the vibrations of the sound waves to a "series of little bones," three of them, called the ossicles, or "hammer, anvil, and stirrup." These transmit the sounds to the fluid-filled inner ear through a membrane called the "oval window." Inside the inner ear is the snail-shaped organ known as the cochlea, and inside the cochlea is the organ of corti, and inside the organ of corti are "thousands of auditory hair cells," actually receptor neurons called stereocilia, that "convert the motion energy of sound waves into electrical signals that are communicated to the auditory nerve." From there, "the signal goes into structures deeper in the brain, until at last it reaches the auditory cortex, where we consciously experience sound." That conscious experience of sound may make it feel as if we immediately recognize and consider all the noises, voices, or music we hear, but as "Odyssey of the Ear" reveals, sound waves have to make quite an epic journey before they reach our brains at all. At that point the waves themselves may have dissipated, but they live on in our consciousness. In other words, "the brain has taken what was outside and made it inside." Related Content: How Did Beethoven Compose His 9th Symphony After He Went Completely Deaf? The Neuroscience of Bass: New Study Explains Why Bass Instruments Are Fundamental to Music The Vincent Van Gogh Action Figure, Complete with Detachable Ear Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. “Odyssey of the Ear”: A Beautiful Animation Shows How Sounds Travel Into Our Ears and Become Thoughts in Our Brain is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 3:00p | Hear Siouxsie Sioux’s Powerful Isolated Vocals on “The Killing Jar,” “Hong Kong Garden,” “Cities In Dust” & “Kiss Them for Me”
Like hundreds of other teenagers in late seventies England, Susan Ballion, better known as Siouxsie Sioux, embraced the anyone-can-do-it-ness of punk after seeing the Sex Pistols. In 1976, already a tastemaker in the scene, she threw a band together with Sid Vicious on drums, and with no practice, or even any songs, they got onstage, and improvised a 20-minute rendition of “The Lord’s Prayer.” There launched the career of a post-punk, dark pop legend, spanning that first anarchic gig, the infamous Bill Grundy TV appearance, some of the most influential British rock of the late-70s and 80s, and major tours and hits throughout the last three decades. Despite the awards, star collaborations, and multi-generational influence, Siouxsie’s striking musical talent has often been given short shrift in the U.S. press. For example, a 1992 Los Angeles Times concert write-up after the release of her biggest U.S. hit, “Kiss Them for Me,” cast her as “the leader of a cult of weird chicks,” writes Liz Ohnanesian at Noisey, “in a review that spent five paragraphs on her looks and a whopping two on the music.” Maybe, “at that point, the band was used to that.” But it’s a serious oversight.
“Much has been written about the vocal range of artists like Freddie Mercury,” Dangerous Minds points out, “but not so much on the equally brilliant Siouxsie Sioux.” If the comparison seems stretched, consider another one: Kate Bush. Though very different artists, both released debut albums in 1978 and became style icons who are as influential for their look as for their vocal prowess. Siouxsie, whose voice “developed from spiky, punky vocals to rich, powerful, and glorious textured tones… can hit the high notes and bring an unnerving warmth and menace to her lower range.”
With Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Creatures, and in her solo work, she has given cool, icy voice to gothic sentiments and images, conveying ache and fear and brutal beauty. In the videos here, listen to Siouxsie’s isolated vocals from 1988’s “The Killing Jar” (hear the original right above), an excellent example of “just how good she is.” Above, also hear her vocal track from “Hong Kong Garden,” her 1978 debut single, and “arguably the most important of the early post-punk hits,” writes Robert Webb at The Independent.
Listen to her sing 1985’s “Cities in Dust,” about the destruction of Pompeii, and below, hear “Kiss Them for Me,” a cryptic tribute to actress Jayne Mansfield and a song that made a new generation of Siouxsie and the Banshees fans when it came out in 1991. Siouxsie has attracted a newly devoted fanbase every decade since the 70s for her style, songwriting, and her voice, an instrument that deserves greater attention.
“These days,” she said in a 2007 interview, the legacy of punk has “almost been reduced to a fashion statement. I think there’s been a false sense of empowerment for women” in music. “Almost as if there’s that ever-present preoccupation with body form and image… not about expressing any style or intent.” Young artists looking for genuine inspiration will always find the real thing in Siouxsie’s impressive body of work. via Dangerous Minds Related Content: Four Female Punk Bands That Changed Women’s Role in Rock Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Hear Siouxsie Sioux’s Powerful Isolated Vocals on “The Killing Jar,” “Hong Kong Garden,” “Cities In Dust” & “Kiss Them for Me” is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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